Writer and Director: Ira Sachs
For some, the most Peter Hujar photograph was of him rather than by him. Seconds after he had just died in 1987, Hujar’s partner, artist David Wojnarowicz, took a photograph. With his face ravaged by AIDS-related illness, Hujar’s image symbolised the devastation that the virus had in New York, on gay men, especially. In recent years, Hujar’s own work has received the attention it rightly deserves; nevertheless, his early death haunts his black and white photographs of the Big Apple’s artistic society, stars such as Susan Sontag, Divine and William Burroughs. While Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day takes place before the AIDS epidemic, this film still acts as an elegy to the photographer.
Sachs’s film is based on a transcript of an interview from 1974 with Hujar by friend and author Linda Rosenkrantz. The original tape recording has been lost, but the transcript was discovered in 2019. Rosenkrantz had planned a book based on conversations with her friends who described their previous day to her in detail. Lives, she surmised, are never so dull as we think they are. The project was never realised, but it now exists in cinematic form in this short, but beautiful film featuring a never better Ben Whishaw.
Incredibly, there is no video footage of Hujar talking or gesturing, just a short audio tape of him speaking, recorded by Wojnarowicz, who himself died in 1992. This means that Whishaw is not impersonating the photographer in any way, apart from a similar haircut and a cool New York accent. All the shrugs and disappointments are Whishaw’s own. The actor is never still; he’s always reaching for a cigarette, or getting up to pour himself another whiskey or to shut a window against the sound of drilling outside Rosenkrantz’s Manhattan apartment.
Rather than have the pair talking across the table and the tape recorder, Sachs places them in other parts of the flat or outside on the roof. At one point they continue their conversation, Hujar going through the minutiae of the day before, on Rosenkrantz’s bed. They appear like lovers at times, and in Rebecca Hall’s sensitive portrayal of the author, it seems like Rosenkrantz desires him in some way. She looks at Hujar with a heartbreaking tenderness.
Peter Hujar’s day turns out to be a gripping one. He has a phone call with Sontag in the morning; a model comes to collect her photographs; he calls to make an appointment to shoot Allen Ginsberg. Hujar worries that he isn’t making enough money, suggesting it’s difficult to be an artist and a businessman at the same time. However, he’s becoming more confident in asking in advance how much he will be paid for his photographs.
As he relates his day to the empathic Rosenkrantz, the light in the apartment shifts towards evening, with the oranges and yellows of the furnishings becoming more pronounced. The end of Hujar’s cigarette glows in the shadows as he talks of the night before. A friend comes round for a shower and Chinese food. After the friend has gone, Hujar develops the images of Ginsberg he took earlier in the day. He’s still smarting from the vague insult Ginsberg gave when talking about Burroughs. Rosenkrantz interrupts Hujar’s monologue to tell him that he needs to eat more.
Peter Hujar’s Day is really about two days: the day Hujar recounts and the day he spends with his friend, and you’ll wish that neither ends. Evocatively shot, Sachs gets the best performances out of both his actors, particularly Whishaw, who starred in Sachs’s previous film Passages. Painfully moving, this film is a testament to a lost generation.
Peter Hujar’s Day is screening at the BFI London Film Festival from 8-16 October.
